From a child I took an interest in historical tales, and felt delight in listening to my mother’s memories of early days. She recollected the American war, and spoke of a family dispute amongst her elders, which lasted just as long—ten years. Excitement in William Pitt’s day she brought vividly before me; and she told how Thelwall, the orator, delivered revolutionary harangues, and being attacked by a mob, he was glad to escape by clambering over the roofs of houses. The trials of Horne Tooke, Hardy, and others, and Erskine’s famous speeches in their defence, were in my boyhood modern incidents. Objects in the city excited archæological tastes. The Norman keep, Herbert de Lozinga’s Cathedral, Erpingham Gate, the Grammar School, the Bishop’s palace, with ruins in the garden, dilapidated towers on the edge of the river, Guild Hall, St. Andrew’s Hall, and the Old Men’s Hospital—these had for me a mighty charm, creating fancies by day and dreams by night. The East Anglian city had not old houses such as Prout found on the Continent, but it contained picturesque, tumble-down tenements, and other “bits,” sketched in “Highways and Byeways of Old Norwich.” The sight of these created a habit of looking after ancient quaint remains, which has never forsaken me.
Guild day, with its triumphal arches, carpets and flags hung out of windows, Darby and Joan sitting in a green arbour, the Mayor’s coach attended by “Snap,” and the “whifflers”; the rush-strewn cathedral pavement, as the Corporation marched up the nave—all this gave birth to boyish enthusiasm for the picturesque. Every Guild day, on a green baize platform near the west door of the cathedral, the head boy of the Grammar School delivered a Latin oration before his Worship. What envy that boy aroused in my bosom! Elections, too, were objects of intense interest to me as a childish politician, when Whig candidates were carried in blue-and-white satin chairs, on the shoulders of men who tossed them up, as the Goths did their heroes upon battle shields.
As to another part of my education, I loved to read the lives of eminent people, and devoured a good many memoirs of men and women in religious magazines. Norwich was at that time distinguished for literary, artistic, and benevolent celebrities; and I felt proud as a boy to think of them as pertaining to my own birthplace. The appearance of several amongst them I have still, after the lapse of seventy years, vividly before me—Mrs. Opie, the Taylors, the Martineaus, Joseph John Gurney, and Bishop Bathurst, with several beside.